International Working Men's Association.
Paris Section of Workers' Rights

[Before the text there is a pencil note in an unknown hand: "Documents", "I" and the stamp: "Cooperative Bakery. Verviers and District."]

TO THE MEMBERS OF THE HAGUE CONGRESS

Comrades,

At this solemn hour when the Fifth Congress
of our great Association is assembling, your Paris brothers, prevented
by an iniquitous law from having themselves represented in the regular
way in your midst, nevertheless consider it their sacred duty to raise
their voices in the name of the socialist principles, in the name of the
oppressed class of which we are all the children and the defenders, and
to send you an energetic appeal.

Comrades,

Be on your guard against the bourgeois, they are watching you,
they are encircling you, they are trying to infiltrate among us! among
you.

Nay, they have already infiltrated, and their pernicious influence
has already borne its fruit.

Every being obeys its nature, the jackal and the hyena like the
bee and the ant. The bourgeois also obeys his nature, which is to live
on the sweat and the blood of the workers.

This dangerous family is divided into several species, all maleficent,
but some less to be feared than others. If there is the cynical enemy,
the industrialist, the merchant, the doctrinarian, who exploit and grind
us in broad daylight, as the barons of the Middle Ages formerly oppressed
their fathers and ours, there are also hypocritical, liberal and liberalising,
republican, democratic, demagogic, anarchist, collectivist and communist
and all kinds of other bourgeois! The name is of little importance to them
so long as they can perceive at the end of all their confessions of faith
the possibility to have their day of power. And when that day comes, if
we dare to move, if we dare to demand even peacefully the fulfilment of
the promises they made when we were the steps by which they ascended, bang!...
rifles and machine guns achieve marvels, and our friends of yesterday shoot
us with greater gusto and ferocity than any monarch by divine right.

Comrades,

It is these bourgeois that we call on you to be on your guard
against, it is they that we urge you to reject from your midst; for they
have already infiltrated your ranks.

This calls for an explanation.

You know, at least in part, the history of the latest events which
have taken place in our country; you know how old provokers of revolution
treated us when it was a matter of defending their ministerial portfolio
or merely their seat as deputy; you learned to your stupor that human
blood had flowed in the gutter and that "for eight days and eight
nights" they turned "the Paris of the Revolution into an immense
human slaughterhouse", and you have been able to see once again what
concern the bourgeois show for the demands of the oppressed proletariat
when they have come to power.

Comrades,

We must tell you everything; the Versaillais were not the only
culprits, they were not the only bourgeois whose dupes and victims we were.

What were the leaders of the Commune? Workers? No! Most
of them were only bourgeoisifying bourgeois. The most honest among them
many a time denied even the existence of a social question, they defended
and rehashed to surfeit the principles of authoritarian Jacobinism. If
these men came to place themselves at the head of a movement which was
socialist by its origin and federalist by its consequences, it was only
to seize a dictatorial power, which, we know full well now, they would
have abused very soon to drive back into the deepest social abyss the aspirations
of the real working classes.

By their forgetfulness when they had come to supreme power one
can judge what would have been their line of action following their triumph.

Did they have any concern for social reforms? Did they decree
the slightest socialist measure? Did they begin to lay the foundations
of social liquidation? Did they at least declare that in the social state
which they wished to establish the worker would be ensured against starvation
and being abandoned at the corner of the opulent boulevards of the revolutionary
city?

No, they did nothing! They stipulated nothing for those who were
dying under their orders. They were in power, that had to suffice. And
how many among them had long been the shame of our party? Bar-loungers,
guzzlers of absiuth, with no avowable means of subsistence, former agents
provocateurs of the Empire, all kinds of infamy had found refuge in this
group, for which one quality was sufficient: to be a bourgeois!

The real workers who became members of the revolutionary government
of Paris, too ignorant and too weak, and above all too timorous, let themselves
be carried away by the loud-mouthed bourgeois, who, far more numerous,
incapable of doing anything themselves, would let nothing be done without
them.

Comrades,

That is the truth about the Paris Commune, and if anybody dared
to try to disprove us, we would reply with names and facts. And yet it
is these men that our General Council welcomed with open arms, after the
struggle, without any discrimination, approved all their actions, in a
word, made common cause with them, thus inconsiderately committing the
whole International Working Men's Association!

Comrades,

It did not suit us immediately after the defeat to deprive them,
by warning you, of the assistance to which every exile has a right. And
then, where were we ourselves! In the cellars of Versailles, at Satory,
on the prison-ships.

But today, when sufficient time has passed, today, when after
having recovered ourselves and checked our impressions one against the
other, we have come to a conviction; today at last, when we see these men,
after having struck a terrible blow at the cause of the workers in France,
preparing to continue their treacherous work in other countries with the
support of their like in every race and every language, today, comrades,
we come to say to you: Beware of the bourgeois! Beware of the aristocrats!

Comrades,

The International is divided, the International is in danger of
dislocation, if not of death; germs of discord have appeared in the midst
of our fraternal Association. On whom must we lay the responsibility? Is
it the workers who felt the need to resurrect the antagonism of races?
Is it the workers who, burning with the desire to create a pontificate
for themselves, did not fear to provoke violent enmities? Are they workers,
those who, always mouthing such words as the emancipation of the proletariat,
wax fat on the labour of slaves, white or black, flaunt before the world
their bourgeois leisures? No, they are not workers!

And yet there are men of that condition among us, their names
are on all your lips. But there is worse still: by our weakness we have
allowed such bourgeois, their coteries, their henchmen, their cliques,
to incarnate in some way our great Association and to be regarded by the
whole world as the grand masters of the International.

Comrades,

We protest with the most violent indignation in the name of those
who died in defence of social ideas, against this sacrilege and this usurpation.

You will not allow this state of affairs to persist.

How can we achieve this?

By a return to principles.

This situation is the natural consequence of a fault, a violation
of the principles of the basic agreement. This fault and this violation
were committed at the Geneva Congress in 1866 by the adoption of Article
8 of the Rules, which is worded as follows:

"Everybody who acknowledges and defends the principles of the Association
is eligible to become a member."

True, the article adds:

"but on the responsibility of the section which admits him".

This responsibility is illusory, as facts have well proved, since it is
owing to this Article 8 that the enemy has infiltrated our ranks, that
he has seized the direction of our army and tried to turn it to the profit
of his ambitions, his ideas, and his bourgeois and aristocratic rancour.

Another fault has been not to have regulated the composition of
sections, which could have been done without prejudice to the autonomy
of these constituent groups of our society, an autonomy which is as dear
to us as to anybody else.

The character of the bourgeois, like that of every decadent class,
is individualistic, egoistic; once it has attained its aims, the bourgeoisie
can understand only one thing: enjoyment!

The worker's nature, on the contrary, inclines him to group, to
the Association.

But the Association is not an arbitrary fact taking place at the
caprice of hazard; on the contrary, it is subject like everything else
to the laws of nature. The first of these laws is community of interests,
the prime source of the feeling of solidarity.

Under the influence of this feeling workers of the same trade
group and associate for the purpose of collective defence; they later unite
with those who, in the same town, practise other trades; then they league
up with their brothers in other towns; then, there finally comes the great
International Working Men's Association, which extends its emancipatory
action to the whole world.

But it is not absolutely like this, as we know, that things happened.
It was necessary, at a certain moment, to found the International Association,
although there were as yet only very few corporative societies founded.
The oppressed, too much inclined to despair, had to be inspired with courage
and confidence. But that could not destroy the natural law of which we
have spoken, according to which the great Association represents the general
interest, and the small associations represent the particular interests
of groups. And the natural groups in our society are the corporative groups.

That, comrades, is what has brought us to the opinion, henceforth
firmly rooted in our minds, that in not making the corporative group the
basis of the International Working Men's Association the Geneva Congress
committed a grave error.

Comrades, This error must be corrected as soon as possible.

Consequently, after due deliberation, the Paris Section of Workers'
Rights voted the following resolutions to be conveyed to the General
Congress being held at The Hague on September 2:

1. Considering:

that the International Association constituted in London on September
28, 1864 has as its purpose "the emancipation of the working classes
by the working classes themselves";

that in keeping with this declaration no person who is not a worker
should be able to be admitted to the said Association to cooperate in the
aim it pursues;

that consequently Article 8 of the General Rules voted at the
Geneva Congress contradicts the first declaration of principles;

it is important, when the germs of dissolution are felt within
the Association, that the latter should return to the principles on which
it is based and which make its strength;

The Section of Workers' Rights is of the opinion that Article 8
must be annulled and replaced by another which could be formulated as follows:

"No person shall be able to become a member of the Association or be
admitted as such by a section if he is not a real worker practising a trade
and living on the product of his work."

2. Considering:

that the International Association has as its purpose the defence of
the material and moral interests of the workers;

that these interests are subdivided not only territorially according
to the countries, provinces, communes inhabited by the workers, but also
according to the corporative groups;

the Paris Section of Workers' Rights thinks it appropriate to introduce
into the General Rules a new article which could be formulated as follows:

"It will be obligatory for sections to be composed of workers of one
and the same trade, actually practising that trade and living on the product
of that practice.

"Nobody will be allowed, if he is not an active member of a section,
to be called to any function within that section, or to be delegated by
it to any congress, local, national or general."

Comrades,

By adopting this project, and by it alone, you will put an end
to the evils threatening our society, for you will root out the infamous
and ignoble bourgeois spirit from our midst for ever.